Tuesday, 1 October 2013

One of my sales tricks is to follow professional speakers on Twitter. Inevitably they will tweet where they were, are or to where they're going. They will retweet complimentary tweets from audience members, complete with hashtags.

That's all I need to know who is where, and when. I'll take the rest from there.

It's a chore hanging in with some of these folks. These types of speakers are twits:

They incessantly tweet motivational quotes not their own

They garner a substantial following based on their profession, then tweet about their personal lives (gimme a break - are everyone's kids on Facebook and Twitter shattering world records in cuteness, athletics and precociousness?)

They write blogs critical of others without having ever walked their mile, so to speak (pardon me as I pause for some introspective thought.....and we're done.)

And if I may offer some advice to live "motivational / inspirational keynote speakers?

I get it. You make us laugh, then you make us cry, then you bring it home. Could you be a little less obvious? Hint - disabled people and slow piano music in the backround is kind of a giveaway. And surely to God the disabled must take umbrage at being nothing but an object of empathy to you people, to say nothing of the dimwitted pianists!

PLEASE stop giving keynotes dependant on other people's YouTube videos (which we've all seen before and by the time you give this canned presentation to us again we'll all have seen too much).

PLEASE stop being so damned smug because you use Apple products and your presentation can do all sorts of cool things Microsoft's can't.

Unless you're being roasted, (not toasted), it ain't about you. EVER. We don't care about your kid, so don't let the women cooing "awwwwww" fool you. They don't care about your kid either, but they can't help themselves. Might be genetic. Not sure.